Today, December 18, we observe the World Arabic language day. This event has been established by the United Nations surprisingly recently - in 2010, although it is difficult to under-appreciate the role the Arab civilisation in general and Arabic language in particular have played not only in shaping and forming cultures and languages in the Middle East, Asia and Africa but also in the Western world. At the same time,Arabic is one of the most powerful languages in the world - it  is a state language in 22 countries, has over 400 million native speakers spread all over the world and Arabic-speaking population is rapidly growing.

One of the reasons why this language and culture are often ignored lies in the diversity, both on the language and cultural levels, of the Arab world: there are currently 22 Arab countries and over a dozen of countries, where Arabic enjoys the status of the co-official language. Moreover, unlike this is the case with the languages we are used to, for instance, English, French, Spanish or Russian, where the difference between Standard and colloquial varieties is minimal, in the sense, that they are mutually intelligible, there is huge gap between Standard Arabic and colloquial Arabic language registers. Standard Arabic (or al-fusha - الفصحة) with its roots stemming from the language of the Qur’an, is considered to be the official language of the state, the language of educated people, administration, and mass media. At the same time, each and every Arab country speaks its own, colloquial or dialectal  variety of Arabic, which is lexically and morphologically fairly different from the Standard, official language. Moreover, the differences between dialects can become so big, that Arabic native speakers from different countries don’t understand each other. This linguistic diversity coupled with the negative image of Arab culture often portrayed by our media are among the reasons why the linguistic and cultural aspects of the Arab world turned out to be on the margins of our sight.

Behind this current state of affairs, however, there is a rich history worth of learning. Arabic language, one of the youngest Semitic languages, is thought to have been born in the Arabian Peninsula among nomad tribes long before the rise of Islam and initially existed predominantly in its oral form. In the 7 century AD, when Arabic became immortalised as the language of the Qur’an and became inseparable from Islam. Starting from that time, Muslim armies started conquering lands, moving eastward from the Arabian Peninsula and spreading Arabic language. Neither Greek or Latin have ever enjoyed the status the Classical Arabic had in the Middle Ages in terms of impact on other languages.

The enormous expanse of conquered territory, gave Arabic a world status, not attained by any other language except, perhaps, English, in our time. By the eleventh century Arabic was widely spoken and written by all educated Muslims from the heart of China to the borders of France, rapidly displacing the old literary languages like Aramaic, Coptic, Greek and Latin. It became the language of art, culture, the scholarship, and technology contributing not only to the Islamic but also the world civilisation.

Shortly after early conquests, the Arabic alphabet began to be adopted by the languages spoken in  the new Islamiclands. In a few centuries, Kurdish, Persian, Pashto, Turkish, a number of languages in the Indian sub-continent; and even languages languages spoken in Medieval Spain began to use the Arabic letters. The use of the Arabic alphabet was well established in all Muslim lands until contested by the Spanish Reconquista and, later, by Western colonisers of Asia and Africa, who worked hard to replace Arabic alphabet by the Latin one. 

In the case of the Iberian peninsula and Spain in particular, Arabic alphabet has been widely used even after the Reconquista: the tradition of aljamiado (from Arabic al-abjadiya -الأبجدية or the alphabet) - using Arabic letters to write in a Romance language has existed at least until the end of the 16th century, i.e., well after the royal decree of Philipp II, which was banning in Spain the use both of spoken and written Arabic in any form and shape. 

On the lexical level, Spanish language has been influenced by Arabic more than any other language spoken in Europe. According to various research, the percentage of Arabic loan-words in Spanish makes up to 5% of the Spanish vocabulary. For native speakers, some of these words have an obviously Arabic/Islamic connotation: imam (imam - إمام), corán (al-qura’n - القرآن). However, the major part of these words are perceived as Spanish: aceite (az-zeytالزيت-), almohada (al-mukhaddaالمخدة-), algodon (al-qutnالقطن-), hasta (hattaحتى-).

Will Arabic make a come back to the cultural stage? Many Arab thinkers express concern that the diversity of the Arab world and the state of cultural and linguistic confusion will make it difficult not only to revive but also to keep its current shape. Let’s see!